Enclaves can be any size, even a single household. I’ve been to very nice houses in India, but once you get outside of them, the neighborhoods are shit. Yes, garbage, literal shit, animals, homeless, everywhere except in areas that are very wealthy and have the influence to make the cops drive out the shit.
India is a liberal democracy, by the way.
Americans’ stereotypes are based on immigrants, mostly, so the typical campesino that we know isn’t reflective of the Mexican society at large. Actually, I’m not even sure where that stereotype comes from in the USA. The campesinos all take hard, unpleasant jobs with no room for laziness at all.
I’ve worked with Mexicans from all walks of life in Mexico for years and years, and beyond a doubt they are some of the hardest workers I’ve known, with an excellent eye for craftsmanship and quality. If the majority of Americans have a poor perception, then that’s just their loss.
Oh, another thought: we often conflate “Mexican” with “Mexican American.” There’s a definite quasi-Mexican subculture in the USA that has some of the superficial aspects of Mexico but lacking any of the fine character. Like, say, you speak Spanish, live in a “Mexican” neighborhood, have a Mexican flag, but don’t know a damned thing about Mexico, are a gang-banger, and run around like an urban youth. That’s not at all reflective of Mexico, but since they call themselves “Mexican” it can be confusing to many of us.
Yeah, it’s easier to see the gang of assholes who like to stand on a corner and stare at passersby than the thousands and thousands of regular folk. Normal people don’t spend their time being obnoxious.
I’m sure that’s true but I was thinking more of comparisons between regions (states/provinces/etc.) than comparisons between individual people.
It’s true South Africa has higher economic inequality than India (or for that matter almost any other country), but the between-province differences in HDI seem to be a bit smaller than India. The last breakdown of HDI by province I found was about ten years old (though the average South African HDI has not changed much since then), but it looks like while the wealthiest province is about on par with the wealthiest Indian state, the least developed province is better off than the least developed Indian states.
I think you’ve got this backwards. The “Protestant work ethic” thing is a hoary old explanation for why America is such a successful country; it is majority Protestant, and Protestantism supposedly emphasizes the importance of hard work and thrift, while Catholicism does not. So in this worldview, Mexico is less successful precisely because they’re mostly not Protestant.
Of course, I suggest a large spoonful of salt with this theory.
I guess it’s just a question of how one defines the term “absolute shithole”. In my book, it takes something more than dirty streets (and I repeat, I’ve also been in many non-wealthy neighborhoods in India where there isn’t shit and garbage and homeless people in the streets, although I agree that there tend to be stray cows and dogs almost everywhere) to make a place an “absolute shithole”.
A locality that has working electricity, peaceful commerce, rule of law, little or no violent crime, children in schools, etc., does not qualify as an “absolute shithole” as far as I’m concerned, even if there’s dog and cow poop on the streets and some homeless people living on the sidewalk.
Excrement, garbage and poverty all tend to be more readily visible in India than they are in some other nations that are at about the same level of development. But if you’re using “absolute shithole” just to characterize that kind of superficial dirtiness, you don’t really have any vocabulary left to describe the countries that are massively broken in ways that India is not.
I agree. I’ve been to maybe fifteen cities/communities across India, mostly on a hotel budget of $4.00 a night (so, not a lot of luxury resorts). Most of the places I went seemed pretty ordinary middle-incomey-- basic, but liveable. What India does have that you don’t get a lot of elsewhere is the massive extreme urban poverty, whcih is in-your-face in a way that rural poverty isn’t. But that wasn’t what really stuck with me most. And this was all ten years ago, when GDP per capita was less than half of what it is now.
“Absolute shithole” is a visual descriptor and doesn’t mean anything about infrastructure. India has some of the best infrastructure in the world. Google results for “define shithole” seem to agree with my use.
But this thread is about differences between and within countries in terms of much more than superficial visual descriptors. We’ve been discussing economy, poverty, crime, corruption, workforce skills, natural/environmental resources, etc.: in other words, overall development.
So while I’m not quarrelling with your assessment that India happens to be the dirtiest-looking place you’ve ever visited, I think that opinion is only tangentially relevant to this thread.
I wonder about Mexico if it is partly due to the weather. When it gets hot its gets harder to work. Thats why in Mexico they has this “siesta” thing. I never heard of that here in the midwest. So I think there is more production in countries that have winter or at least cooler temperatures. It always amazed me how much scientific advancement came out of Russia.
I doubt that these different economic sectors in Mexico have been experiencing substantially different weather since 1999.
And your hypothesis about Russia is kind of ludicrous. Yes, Russia has been home to many brilliant scientists and mathematicians, but it’s not exactly known for high production.
(And by the way, as in many other warm countries, it’s customary to take siestas in Greece.)
See now , that’s the issue here. Looking at a complex country like India which wasn’t even a country till 1947 through " western " , myopic lenses and forming an opinion and then plastering it all over these internet forums.
People who live in the part of the planet you people call India have a very different idea of what " developed " and " developing " means than U.S , Western Europe .
Actually, Catholicism does consider work very important, but it also considers the idea that there’s a link between your financial status and your piety, or the sister notion that by giving money to a church you’ll become rich, to be somewhere between extremely bogus and straight heretical.
This is an American-based forum, although we have a lot of international posters. Having lived and participated in the life of people in many different parts of the world tends to leave me a little bit more open-minded than my compatriots, and so I stick by my assessment of India. The vast majority of my highly-educated Indian coworkers tend to agree with my assessment and have no intention of returning to India if they can get assigned elsewhere.
Sure, Detroit is better than Chennai, but that doesn’t mean Detroit is “good.” It just means there are worse places to be.
:dubious: Of course, the opinions of Indians who have already chosen to live outside India are naturally going to be somewhat biased towards the view that living outside India is better than living within India.
Your Indian coworkers have no desire to move back because they are making more money here. If they are highly educated as you said , they probably are physicians/engineers/IT professionals and compared to the same professions in India , they will of course make more money. It’s as simple as that.
Try not to judge the country by going down a checklist and comparing it point by point with the US to see who comes ahead. It’s a different world out there which has been carved out of an entirely different mindset and set of principals. Some better , some worse but different.
Mexico is a firmly upper middle income economy. The size of it’s economy is only second largest in all of Latin America after Brazil. Globally it ranks 15th, and is one of only 15 nations with GDP nominal of one trillion. The Mexican economy ranks above other developing and developed nations.
Here is the list for end 2014. It will be updated in January after 2015 is over.